Angolan and Cape Verdean users

[Jordi Mallach]

Hello,

On Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 03:39:56PM +0000, Matthew East wrote:
> Jordi, copying you into this from the middle of an ubuntu-translators
> thread.

Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I have a bit of email unread in
this list right now...

> On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 09:32 -0500, Og Maciel wrote:
> > Don't know who did the inicial setup and/or who chose to break the
> > languages apart, but here are some interesting facts about the
> > portuguese language translations under Breezy:
> > 
> > Portuguese   	 071.61 26.6 percent published, 0.1 percent changed,
> > 1.69 percent new, 71.61 percent untranslated
> > 
> > Portuguese (Brazil) 	060.55 35.64 percent published, 0.11 percent
> > changed, 3.7 percent new, 60.55 percent untranslated
> > 
> > Portuguese (Portugal) 	098.48 1.38 percent published, 0.01 percent
> > changed, 0.14 percent new, 98.48 percent untranslated
> > 
> > Obviously a lot of re-inventing the wheel going here...  The same can
> > be seen in other languages as well, such as English, Russian, French,
> > Spanish, etc, etc...

There's little people haven't said yet, but here's my 2¢:

"Reinventing the wheel" is not exactly correct, in the Portuguese case.
The two Portuguese locales that we should be really seeing in Rosetta
(for now) is pt (for Portuguese as spoken in Portugal) and pt_BR (as
spoken in Brazil). pt_PT exists in some places because in the early
stages of Rosetta, people could translate to whatever they wanted, and
this opened the door for many country-specific translators that should
have never existed in Rosetta.

As Carlos has said, the Portuguese case is special. There is enough
divergence between pt and pt_BR that Brazilians will not feel any desire
to help out in the "base" "pt" effort, and they can even get pissed off
when the system presents them with "pt" strings because "pt_BR" wasn't
translated.

There are other cases of valid country specific locales, like the
Chinese (CN, TW, HK...), but in general it's correct to assume we should
avoid them. Rosetta has some products with es_* or fr_* translations that
should not appear, but as the admins don't have ways of saying which
strings should be merged to the "base" po, there hasn't been a real try
to fix this.

What we should do to get rid of them is that LoCo and translation team
leaders tell us what to do, in a language per language basis.

In short, the Portuguese case should remain with a pt_BR translation,
while pt_PT should be dropped/merged, and if you see upstream projects
shipping tarballs with pt_PT.po files, you should ask them to please
rename their file to "pt.po".

In general, I'd only accept the creation of new country-specific
translation groups if there's a really good reason and background for it
to exist.

The other day, for example, some Galician users approached and asked for
pt_ES. They tried to justify this, and we might see such team soon in
launchpad. When this kind of thing happens, I expect that the pt_ES
people will have a fluid communication with the pt people, so they can
try to cooperate as much as they can.

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi at sindominio.net     jordi at debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
GnuPG public key information available at http://oskuro.net/
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